Certain off-road vehicles, including industrial vehicles such as agricultural vehicles (e.g., harvesters, combines, tractors, etc.), construction vehicles (e.g., loaders, bulldozers, excavators, etc.) and forestry vehicles (e.g., feller-bunchers, tree chippers, knuckleboom loaders, etc.), as well as military vehicles (e.g., combat engineering vehicles (CEVs), etc.), to name a few, may be equipped with elastomeric endless tracks which enhance their traction and floatation on soft, slippery and/or irregular grounds (e.g., soil, mud, sand, ice, snow, etc.) on which they operate.
Typically, a track assembly of a tracked vehicle comprises a plurality of wheels and an endless track disposed around these wheels. The wheels include a drive wheel to impart motion to the endless track and a plurality of idler wheels to support part of the vehicle's weight on the ground via the track, guide the track as it is driven by the drive wheel, and/or tension the track.
Loading on a track assembly is often supported by a limited part (e.g., about 50% to 68%) of an inner side of its elastomeric endless track. For example, some idler wheels of the track assembly are roller wheels that roll on the track's inner side along a bottom run of the track to apply it on the ground. The roller wheels are located between frontmost and rearmost ones of the wheels of the track assembly and, in certain types of work vehicles such as agricultural or construction vehicles, are sometimes referred to as “mid-rollers”. The track's inner side comprises rolling paths on which the roller wheels roll and a plurality of elastomeric guide/drive projections, referred to as “lugs”, which are located between the rolling paths and used to guide and/or drive the track. Since the rolling paths are limited to those areas between the guide/drive lugs and lateral edges of the track, loading on the roller wheels is applied only to those limited areas of the track. In some cases, this may result in high wear of the track's rolling paths or even internal damage (e.g., cables rupturing) within the track. In other cases, this may impose certain limits on a load-carrying capacity of the tracked vehicle (e.g., a total weight of the vehicle) since it may cause unacceptably high ground pressure.
For these and other reasons, there is a need for improving track assemblies of off-road vehicles.